On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 07:52:13PM -0700, William Stein wrote:
> This is ridiculous. If we made a==b true only if parent(a) ==
> parent(b), we would get nonstop complaints and confusion from users,
> and would be doing something different and massively more *pedantic*
> than every other math software system I have ever used.
For information: in MuPAD, equality is plain syntactical equality
(same type, same internal representation), and as far as I know this
has never been seriously complained about, despite users ranging from
high school student to researchers.
Testing the semantical equality of a and b is usually done by
iszero(a-b) (or some variant thereof for e.g. groups).
The only smoothie is that, as a very special exception, 6/3 returns an
integer and not a rational number, so that 6/3 = 2 is actually true.
Best,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nthi...@users.sf.net>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/
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